Joe Manchin and the Death of the Left in West Virginia
By
David Gottfried
Joe Manchin, Dixiecrat Senator from the State of West Virginia, has finally said, in no uncertain terms, that he is staunchly opposed to the Build Back Better Act and to almost all progressive reforms advocated by left of center Democrats. Big Surprise. Although he had vociferously argued against liberal reforms, he always held out the possibility that he would support measures which would alleviate the plight of the pauperized working class. Of course, we all knew he was bullshitting. But bullshitting has a long and venerable history among the deceptive Democrats of the center. After all, Lyndon Johnson, Machiavellian manipulator second to none, presented himself as the peace candidate in the 1964 election, stating that he would not order American boys to fight a war that should be fought by South Vietnamese boys. And after getting elected, our troop levels skyrocketed from under 50,000 to 500,000.
Many people will probably assume that this should have been expected. They will forget the adjective “West” in West Virginia and just think of Virginia, a state whose capital was the capital of the confederacy, the state of Jefferson Davis and arrogant, affluent plantation owners sipping Mint Julips on the lawns of their spacious and spectacular mansions. They will surmise that as a semi-Southern State or a border state it is inexorably pulled to the right.
WEST VIRGINIA WAS BUILT IN OPPOSITION TO VIRGINIA
However, West Virginia was built in opposition to the South and the State of Virginia. Very simply, when Virginia seceded from the union, people in the Western part of Virginia seceded from Virginia and founded the independent polity of West Virginia. This new state diverged from Virginia topographically and demographically. It was much more mountainous, and this terrain made it far from ideal for plantations. Because it wasn’t well-suited for plantations, it wasn’t as “English” as Virginia. Because Virginia was, in large measure, a state of Plantation masters surrounded by doting black slaves, it recalled feudal England where white serfs bowed down low before haughty British lords. Of course, those white serfs were not members of a different race, but the rich treated them as if they were members of a different species. (Consider George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London.” The poor was so severely poverty stricken that they were much, much shorter than wealthier Brits as a state of quasi famine reigned in perpetuity in the hovels and shacks of the persecuted peasantry) Actually, a close analysis of American history shows that although Virginia was the home of so many of America’s Founding Fathers, it was, in a way, fundamentally un-American in its tendency to deride Democracy.
WEST VIRGINIA STOOD IN OPPOSITION TO VIRGINIAN AND CONFEDRATE KINSHIP WITH PRE=DEMOCRATIC, ARISTOCRATIC ENGLAND
Virginia was founded by the English cavaliers, those aristocratic Englishmen who left England after Cromwell and more Democratically aligned forces ascended to power.
(I am not praising Cromwell. He was dictatorial and some would say even bloodthirsty, but he was aligned with forces sympathetic to democratic mores and he did stand in opposition to the Crown. Massachusetts, by contrast, was founded by the Puritans, who largely opposed royal privilege. In short, the major schism in American politics, the divide between the more liberal North and the almost feudal South, had its origins in English history.)
In any event, West Virginia, a state largely bereft of enormous plantations, submissive slaves and supercilious slave masters, did not kowtow to the pre-Democratic predilections of the South.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION ACCENTUATED WEST VIRGINIA’S AFFILIATION WITH PROGRESSIVE POLITICS
After the Civil War, the industrial revolution picked up steam, and the demand for coat surged. West Virginia soon became a state known for its legions of impoverished, beleaguered coal miners. The coal miners of West Virginia, unburdened by the quasi-fascistic ideology of neighboring Southern states, understood that a certain measure of class collectivism was called for and they valiantly, and sometimes violently, fought to vindicate workers’ rights.
Accordingly, West Virginia had been one of the most progressive states in the nation. In 1960, many politicos were certain that John F Kennedy would lose the West Virginia primary as Kennedy was Catholic and West Virginia was 96 percent Protestant. Nevertheless, Kennedy won, and some analysts believe that his victory was facilitated because West Virginians wanted to prove to the rest of the nation that they were not mired in archaic sectarian prejudices. (He also won because of a ton of money. He traveled through the State on a plane; Hubert Humphrey campaigned on a lumbering, dowdy school bus, and Humphrey said that he felt like a small businessman in competition with a mammoth chain store.) There are stronger examples of West Virginia’s enduring progressivism. In 1968, when the Democratic Presidential Candidate was slaughtered in the South, he won West Virginia. In 1980, when Jimmy Carter was demolished across the country, loosing even States such as New York, he won West Virginia. In 1988, when the Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, won only ten states, he won West Virginia.
HOW THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY ALIENATED THE WORKING CLASS OF WEST VIRGINIA
However, today West Virginia votes, in Presidential elections, for Republicans with a vengeance. Trump’s margins in that state, in 2016 and 2020, were as mountainous as the State’s rocky and daunting terrain. It is not as if West Virginians all suddenly made a mint by becoming day traders. It is not as if the state is chock full of digital doyens who made millions through shady, internet intrigues. Rather, it is still a state that is very poor, with inadequate housing, health care and education, all of the things that Joe Manchin does not give a damn about as demonstrated by his mutilation of the Build Back Better plan which had sought to alleviate those problems.
Why is West Virginia voting against its self-interest ? Why is it represented, in Congress, by a man who seems to sneer at the poor almost as much as JP Morgan sneered at the state’s coal miners, starving and afflicted with black lung disease ?
Of course, part of the problem stems from the tendency of Democrats to have forgotten about social class and to bow before identity politics, a truly barbaric phenomenon as it holds that one is defined by one’s race or one’s sex and as such is no different from classic European racism. This vulgar notion, which says that if one is white and male one is automatically privileged even if one is a poverty-stricken coal miner, subject to mining collapses and black lung disease, must be anathema to every white man who has ever sung the blues.
Of course, the Democratic Party, for at least the past ten years, has realized that it must rediscover its proletarian base. It has finally realized that it can’t win with just the votes of racial minorities and wine and cheese academics. (Why do so many of my fellow intellectuals favor such boring, shit-assed food) Nowadays, the Democratic party seems to have newly discovered economics and the inequitable distribution of money and property. However, the Democratic party still suffers from a doddering image, immemorably lampooned by Tom Wolfe’s quip that liberal ladies on Park Avenue were hosting dinner parties for the Black Panthers. So many of the spokesman of the Democratic Party seem like well-mannered prep school princesses who, in George Wallace’s rhetoric, didn’t have enough common sense to park a bicycle straight and whose briefcases were filled with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
More importantly, many poor people – whether they are voting for Bernie Sanders or not voting at all – believe that Democratic Party professions of concern for the poor are wholly bogus. After all, Chuck Schumer, who is as blue as a poor man whose skin tone is blue because he died in the gutter because of the ineptitude of New York’s blundering behemothic Welfare bureaucracy, has been one of the biggest defenders of the special tax exemption that lets billionaire hedge fund managers pay less in taxes than their secretaries. After all, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, who helped rig the 2016 Democratic primaries against Bernie Sanders, enjoys, as her major campaign contributor, check cashing entrepreneurs who persecute the poor with charges and interest rates that should be declared criminal. After all, the phoniness of Democratic liberalism is so pronounced that even Barack Obama was one of its prime agents: His campaign said that he was too noble to take money from lobbyists. Of course, he didn’t take money from lobbyists. He did not need to. Instead of taking money from lobbyists, he took contributions directly from corporations (A corp. can easily circumvent a limit on contributions by contributing 1000 dollars to 1000 different organizations spending money on a candidate or by having 1000 executives of a corporation each give 1000 to a candidate). And Obama, that great apostle for the poor, decided that Medicare would not be empowered to bargain with big pharma for lower prices. But that made sense: Obama, lying liberal extraordinaire, got more money from big pharma than either Hillary or John Mc Cain.
THE POSSIBILITY OF LEFTIST RESURGENCE IN WEST VIRGINIA
Of course, every now and then, West Virginia remembers its progressive roots. Every now and then the West Virginia that wailed and railed like Mother Jones (She fought for coal miners who affectionately called her Mother Jones) rises up, poor as hell but resplendent in its adamantine gutsiness. And it happened in 2016, when West Virginia voted overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. It was quite astonishing. Bernie Sanders sounds and acts and walks and talks like a Brooklyn Jew with a big mouth. He is as Jewish as Joan Rivers’ Grandfather giving her Hannukah gelt (Chocolate candies wrapped in gold foil to resemble coins). Nevertheless, Bernie Sanders clobbered Queen Hillary, who knows Protestant hymns as well as that severe Presbyterian schoolmarm, played by Bette Davis, in “The Corn is Green.”
Although West Virginia still has the germs of progressive rebellion, the possibility of a revival is limited, in no small measure because of the arrogance of the Democratic Party’s supposedly urbane elites. A day or two after Bernie Sanders won the 2016 primary in West Virginia, the New York Times published an article, written by “liberal” Charles Blow, which essentially said that Bernie Sanders won West Virginia because the state consisted of racist hicks.
Joe Manchin and the Death of the Left in West Virginia
Bernie Sanders was the first political rally I attended. People cannot be made to debase themselves and if a politician encourages people to debase themselves they must be ignored because someone in touch with the spirit can give light to all peoples.
This was a great article; are you doing reading or is this old knowledge that's come forward?